Finished???

A year ago before heading to Susan Harris' stable in Louisville, KY to work for a month I started searching the internet for barns near colleges knowing that the inevitable would happen: I would have to apply for college eventually. When this happened I wanted to have a list of places that first off had barns nearby. This immediately ruled out city schools. In my online adventures I came across Equiventure, a barn set 15 mins away from Duke University (score!!!!). And who was based out of Equiventure but the fabulous Holly Hudspeth herself (double score!!!). I immediately emailed Holly asking if she wanted a working student next summer (because while summer '10 was full, summer '11 was looking widee open).
I later talked to Boyd Martin's working student coordinator, Lillian Heard about working for Boyd in the time that Holly would be lazy-ing around giving birth to a child and what not.
So by the time this spring came around I already had my days from May to August filled with working student fun. Every time I saw anything referencing Holly, Boyd, summer, working students, horses etc I immediately thought about what I would be doing and would get excited all over again. This resulted in me getting randomly energized throughout the spring and telling the most unhorsey people ever about all the details of my summer.
Well as shown through my blog this summer, I did it! It is now August, I've been home for 4 days now and am slowly realizing that my super exciting and educational summer is essentially over. Sure I've got a few more weeks of buying stuff for college and lounging around to do, but I'm not working anymore. And boy let me tell you, that is a very, very, VERY strange thought.
In a quick recap:
-Working for Holly again was amazing
-Apollo and I made some huge progress on the flat over fences
-Apollo is still in NC until the 21st going through some intense dressage bootcamp with Holly
-Apollo was unbelievable in warm up and I just wasn't able to get the same feeling once we went into the ring. But I had so much fun just doing dressage and not fighting him through the test that I didn't even mind our 42
-picking up the final trot a huge bug landed on Apollo's neck and he tried so hard to ignore the bloodsucker hanging from his neck (huge progress, just take my word for it)
-We placed 4th in JYOP at Fair Hill HT (so we have now placed 4th-7th in prelim, yay!!!)
-Maxine and Ned Divine also placed 4th in JOT
-Allie and Notable Grace did very well after dressage and show jumping but had a silly stop xc which cost them a ribbon in JOT
All in all I have had an amazing summer so far, and can't wait till we go back to get Apollo to see how much he will have improved since Fair Hill!